Checking the Facts

I seemed to remember that an angel rolled the stone away but, since a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age and, not wanting to contribute to the epidemic of fake news that has been sweeping the country lately, I looked it up in all four gospels. They each give a slightly different account of the story. In Mathew it was Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary" who discovered that the stone had been rolled away, in Mark it was the two Marys and Salome, in Luke it was the two Marys and Joanna, and in John it was Mary Magdalene by herself. All witnesses seem to agree that the stone had already been rolled away when they got there and that the body of Jesus was gone. Although there was at least one angel present at the tomb, in Luke and John it was two angels, there were no credible witnesses who actually saw an angel roll away the stone. Mathew tells about some soldiers who were assigned to guard the tomb lest somebody remove the body and falsely claim that Jesus had arisen, but their testimony is unreliable because, when the angel appeared, they "trembled in fear and became like dead men". We will never know if any of those guards saw the stone being rolled away before they passed out because the High Priest allegedly bribed them to circulate the story that somebody stole the body away while they were asleep. "And that story has been told among the Jews even unto this day." The High Priest also allegedly promised to fix it with the governor in case the soldiers got into trouble for sleeping on guard, but we don't know if he kept his promise or left the soldiers literally twisting in the wind.

Although I find it disturbing, I shouldn't be surprised that the iconic six pack is being downsized to a four pack. For some time now, producers have been quietly reducing the container size of diverse products, with little or no corresponding reduction in price. Many products that used to be sold by the pound are now packaged in 14 or 15 ounce containers. Blue Bonnet spread (they don't even call it margarine anymore) proudly proclaims that their former one pound container is "still 15 ounces", implying that other brands have been reduced even further, which might well be true. The typical half gallon of ice cream has been 1.75 quarts for so long that, when one company advertised theirs as being "still a half gallon", nobody knew what they were talking about. Since then, some brands have reduced their half gallon container size even further to 1.5 quarts. I am normally not in favor of big government intervening in the market place but, in this case, I think their ought to be a law against that.

I got an email notification today that somebody had left a comment on one of my posts from April, 2014. The entire text of this comment is "grt". While the commenter has a profile on Blogger, there is no information in it except that they have been here since May, 2015. Assuming that "grt" is internet slang for "great", I should be flattered, but I still wish the comment had been a little more specific.